The Mother-Daughter Puzzle: A New Generational Understanding of the Mother-Daughter Relationship

By Rosjke Hasseldine

From the sales desk to the boardroom, too many women feel as though they are “giving from a place of empty,” constantly putting their wants and needs last in a culture that expects them to give and never take. If this describes you, take heart! The source of your dilemma might well spring from the relationship you have (or had) with

• Language: English
• Publisher: Women's Bookshelf Publishing
• Release date: Jun 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9780955710421

Rosjke Hasseldine

Rosjke Hasseldine MS MBACP (Accredited) is a world renowned Mother-Daughter Relationship expert, teacher, and therapist, having worked with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different cultures throughout her long career. She is the founder of Mother-Daughter Coaching International LLC, where she passes on her model of understanding and strengthening the mother-daughter relationship to mental health professionals and coaches. Rosjke is the author of The Silent Female Scream and The Mother-Daughter Puzzle. She blogs for the Huffington Post and American Counseling Association, taught Women in Leadership at the University of New Hampshire, and organized a panel on the mother-daughter relationship for the United Nations 62nd Commission on the Status of Women, March 2018, New York City.

Book preview

Introduction

When women are heard, mothers and daughters are able to listen to each other.

The story of how I came to write this book started a long time ago on an ordinary sunny day in Christchurch, New Zealand when I was sixteen. I had just returned to school after having been home for lunch and as I locked my bike to the bike stands, I heard a voice warn me I should watch out, because something was wrong with the way my mother treated me. I didn’t understand where the voice was coming from; there was no one there. I also didn’t recognize the voice, nor did I understand to what it was referring. My mother wasn’t angry or upset with me at that moment. But the voice had sounded so clear and insistent, it jolted me into questioning my relationship with my mother for the first time.

Like most children, I believed my family was normal because I didn’t know anything different. It felt normal that my mother’s rules, moods, and beliefs ruled our house because no one, not even my father and grandparents (my mother’s parents), challenged her. No one questioned my mother’s decisions, her name-calling, her physical violence, or her infamous ability to dish out silent treatment whenever anyone upset her. As the eldest child, I was expected to be obedient and set a good example for my four siblings. And as the elder daughter, I was supposed to step into my mother’s shoes and walk a repeat of her life. I grew up watching her anxiously anticipating her mother’s every need, and I knew from a young age that this was what my mother wanted me to do for her. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I realized how unbending my mother was, and that she wasn’t going to renegotiate the rules she had set out for our relationship.

It’s fair to say that the voice I heard in the bike stands when I was sixteen increased the conflict between my mother and I because it made me question whether I was responsible for her happiness. It created a gap between her voice, which I had learned to believe in, and my own voice that was starting to speak to me in louder whispers. I began to feel angry about having to apologize when I hadn’t done anything wrong. Over time, I started to challenge myself to not give into my fear about upsetting Mom and to resist apologizing as long as I could.

Once, when I was nineteen, I held out for five days against apologizing for some infraction I wasn’t aware I’d committed. On that Monday, Mom suddenly became angry with me and withdrew into her usual stony, angry silence. On Friday morning, as I sat at the piano to do my daily practice and yelled at my sister because I thought she had misplaced the piano music I needed, Mom’s silent anger erupted into violence. Mom stormed into the room and started hitting me around the head. Mom hitting us wasn’t an unusual event, but this was a frenzied attack. I shielded my head with my hands and waited until she was finished. Somehow her physical outburst helped her get over her anger, and she started talking to me again. And I felt victorious because I hadn’t apologized when I had nothing for which to apologize. Again, it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I realized how abusive my mother had been that Friday morning—and how abusive it was to make me responsible for her unhappiness.

During my twenties, my relationship with Mom yo-yoed between us holding onto our silence until her coldness, or a family event I wanted to attend and couldn’t until I apologized, or my emotional need for her, grew too much, and I would apologize for anything and everything. And each time I apologized, I hoped my mother would be different. I’d fantasize that she would somehow start listening to me and recognize that I had feelings of my own that deserved to be heard. But sadly, she never changed. She refused to listen to me right up until she died, which I since learned to understand was a result of her emotional health issues and extreme emotional starvation.

My mother lived a hard life. Underneath her extreme need for control was a hurt, angry girl who hadn’t been listened to enough, or loved enough, by her parents and husband. My mother’s mother was a stoic, emotionally silent woman who made my mother responsible for her unmet needs. Her own father was a controlling, emotionally manipulative man who criticized her whenever she did something he didn’t agree with. And my father was a typical man of her generation, steadfast in his role as provider and emotionally unavailable. I believe my mother’s behavior was a result of having experienced too much emotional neglect from her parents and husband, too much violence during the years she was held prisoner, at ten years old, in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War, and an overwhelming level of sexism that had stopped her from feeling entitled to be heard. And as her daughter, I was supposed to make all this pain go away.

At twenty-six, I had another big awakening when my daughter was born. As I wrote in my first book, The Silent Female Scream, when "I heard the midwife say that I had a daughter, a chill ran through my body and a voice in my head said, If I don’t get my shit straight, this new girl isn’t going to have a happy life."¹ Like that voice at sixteen, this voice woke me up to knowing I could no longer delay in finding out what had gone wrong between my mother and I.

There was something different about having a daughter, rather than my son, who’d been born three years earlier. With Olivia, the legacy of unmothered daughters and emotionally neglected and invisible women that stretched far behind me felt dangerously close to infecting her life. I didn’t want her to grow up feeling unmothered, invisible, and worried that her voice and feelings didn’t matter. I didn’t want her to come home every day from school with an anxious knot in her stomach, as I had, because she was worried I would be in a bad mood. I wanted her to grow up knowing that she was entitled to have her thoughts, feelings, and needs heard. I wanted her to grow up feeling free to be herself, and not be limited by the role expectations, myths, and stereotypes that had restricted my own and my mother’s lives. I did not want her to inherit my family’s generational belief that good mothers and daughters are selfless, self-denying, and self-sacrificing, because I had already learned from having watched my mother and grandmother that these role expectations are toxic to women’s emotional wellbeing and mother-daughter relationships.

But knowing that something had to change is not the same as knowing how to change it. At twenty-six I had no role model who showed me how to mother differently. And in New Zealand during the 1980s there were no workshops or courses on the mother-daughter relationship or therapists who specialized in the mother-daughter relationship. So I devoured all the books I could find on women’s rights and empowerment, including classics like My Mother My Self by Nancy Friday, The Cinderella Complex by Colette Dowling, and When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends by Victoria Secunda. I watched The Oprah Winfrey Show because she was the first woman I heard who spoke out about women’s entitlement to speak their emotional truths. I talked to anyone and everyone about their mother-daughter relationship. And the more women I talked to, the more I realized that my mother and I weren’t alone with our problems. I poured my heart out in my journals. And I went back to college to finish my Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, even though it wasn’t welcomed by my family or my in-law family.

I also created a parenting style where I put my children’s needs first. At the time, I thought this was the answer to changing the generational pattern of unheard and unloved daughters. Putting my children’s needs first was also the message of good mothering I was surrounded by. Since then, through my mother-daughter relationship research, and other scholarly research, I’ve learned that this parenting style only served to repeat in my life the selflessness, self-denial, and sacrifice that had harmed my mother’s and grandmother’s emotional wellbeing, limited their opportunities, and created a sticky, codependent relationship with each other. By denying my own needs I was showing my daughter that, as a girl, her needs mattered, but when she grew up and became a mother, her needs would evaporate because it would be her job to meet her children’s, husband’s, and family’s needs.

After multiple moments of extreme exhaustion I finally woke up to how I had recreated my inherited pattern of self-neglect in nearly every part of my life. I had recreated it in my marriage and friendships because I rarely asked for help or support. I had recreated it in the way I mothered because I had made myself invisible as a person, and like my mother, I was setting my daughter up to meet my unvoiced needs. And I had recreated it in the way I squeezed my work around the edges of my family because I didn’t believe I had the right to ask my family to make space for my work life.

What started as a personal quest quickly grew into my life’s calling as I realized that my mother’s and my conflict, though extreme, wasn’t unusual. Despite the research on women’s development, there is a worldwide epidemic of mother-daughter conflict that is screaming to be told, because solving the mother-daughter puzzle is essential for women’s emotional development, emotional empowerment, and equality. Too many mothers and daughters are suffering from not feeling heard or understood, because the women’s movement and counseling training courses largely ignore this key female relationship. And too many mothers and daughters feel ashamed of their conflict because they have been led to believe that their conflict is due to their own pathology, which in most cases is simply not true. Research clearly shows that mother-daughter conflict is a reflection of how women are treated in their generational family, culture, and society.

In 1993 I facilitated my first, and New Zealand’s first, mother-daughter workshop, in the hall of St. Mark’s Methodist Church in my hometown of Christchurch. This was a huge deal for me because back then I was terrified of public speaking. But as I discussed the mother-daughter relationship with about thirty women, I knew this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. So when my husband and I and our two young children moved to Bloomington, Indiana in 1993, I applied and was admitted into the Counseling master’s program at Indiana University.

Mom didn’t cope well with my move to America. With too much generational trauma of loss and separation, and no voice to process her feelings, she returned every letter I wrote unopened, until she finally wrote to me, accusing me of being a bad daughter and asking me to stop writing because she no longer wanted to see me.

Reading her message, I had another moment where a voice saved me. As I sat on the bed tearfully looking at her hateful words, I suddenly felt a warm blanket being put around my shoulders and a voice saying, Leave it to me, it’s going to be all right.

The voice was correct. Without knowing it, or meaning to, my mother gave me my career. Thanks to her I have had the privilege of helping thousands of women over the years solve their mother-daughter puzzle and change harmful generational patterns and cultural beliefs.

After my graduation in 1997, our family moved to Nottingham, England, where I set up my private practice specializing in the mother-daughter relationship, which as far as I know is the first in the world. In 2011, my husband and I relocated to New Hampshire in the United States, where we live today.

I am blessed to have worked with so many courageous women and girls who have helped me uncover the mysteries of the mother-daughter relationship. And I am grateful to my fellow pioneers—you know who you are—who have invited me to give the keynote address at your conference, facilitate a workshop, or give a lecture, so I could disseminate my knowledge. But being a pioneer is hard, especially when the mother-daughter relationship is a marginalized subject in the counseling and coaching professions. Even though the counseling, social work, and coaching professions are female dominated, women have a hard time getting heard. The theories therapists use are often created by men, and the theories created by women are frequently ignored. And in many instances men, not women, are viewed as leaders. This has made it hard for me to be heard, especially since I talk about a female-only subject that holds patriarchy accountable for the damage it inflicts on mothers and daughters by the way it silences women’s feelings, thoughts, and needs.²

Ironically, regardless of the wealth of research from feminist writers and academics, the women’s movement has been just as culpable in the way it has ignored the power the mother-daughter relationship has to challenge sexist thinking and create gender equality. In their rush to enshrine gender equality into law, the women’s movement has forgotten to address how women internalize the sexism they experience and how a daughter inherits her mother’s internalized sexism.

I don’t know why the women’s movement has been reticent in engaging in this conversation and using it to change women’s lives and relationships. It might be because they’re afraid of being criticized for victim blaming, which is entirely unfounded. Understanding the way women internalize the sexism to which they’re exposed is not victim blaming, it’s emotionally empowering. Or is it because the women’s movement has internalized the sexism that marginalizes the mother-daughter relationship into self-contained dyads, with separate issues such as mothers with difficult teenage daughters and adult daughters with demanding elderly mothers? As I show throughout this book, the mother-daughter relationship is a lifelong, three-generation relationship that tells the story of women’s lives and how families, societies, cultures, and religions emotionally treat women.

Thankfully, as with all new ideas, there is a tipping point when suddenly a new idea becomes mainstream, and I am seeing this happen with the mother-daughter relationship. I am hearing more women and girls talking about how they recognize the importance of understanding their mother-daughter history and the themes and co-opted sexism being passed down the generations. Women and girls are talking about how the next stage of the women’s movement involves claiming

Reviews for The Mother-Daughter Puzzle

[Madea Brooks · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I have been reading a lot about mother daughter relationships. I have related to most of the books I’ve read besides this one. I really don’t think that the mother daughter relationship has anything to do with feminism. And I am not jealous of my daughters freedoms because women have more rights now. I think that is pretty ridiculous. I have two daughters and the one that I have challenges with is the one that is most similar to myself. I see her making the same mistakes I did and I don’t want her to experience the pain I did. That’s not because of jealousy or sexism.